Tablets are one of the most frequently employed delivery forms for most medicinal preparations. This situation can be explained by the fact that this dosage form allows for accurate dosage of the active component of the medicinal formulation. Furthermore, handling and packaging are easier and shelf life and stability of these preparations are generally better than those of other formulations.
These same arguments also explain the reason why tablets are often used as media for other applications such as food, including confectionery products, aromas or sweeteners, detergents, dyes or phytosanitary products.
A solid bulk of granulate mass, which is necessary for manufacturing tablets, can be manufactured using two main processes, wet granulation or dry granulation. Tablets may also be manufactured using direct compression. Direct compression relates to the tableting process itself rather than preparation of the starting material.
In wet granulation, components are typically mixed and granulated using a wet binder. The wet granulates are then sieved, dried and optionally ground prior to compressing into tablets. Wet granulation is used extensively in the pharmaceutical industry although it has proven to be a difficult method, mainly because the liquids needed in the granule and tablet manufacturing process often have an adverse effect on the characteristics of the active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) and/or on the end product such as a tablet.
Dry granulation is usually described as a method of controlled crushing of precompacted powders densified by either slugging or passing the material between two counter-rotating rolls. More specifically, powdered components that may contain very fine particles are typically mixed prior to being compacted to yield hard slugs which are then ground and sieved before the addition of other ingredients and final compression to form tablets. Because substantially no liquids are used in the dry granulation process, the issues related to wet granulation are avoided. Although dry granulation would in many cases appear to be the best way to produce products such as tablets containing APIs, it has been relatively little used because of the challenges in producing the desired kind of granules as well as managing the granulated material in the manufacturing process. Known dry granulation methods, as well as the known issues related to them are well described in scientific articles, such as the review article “Roll compaction/dry granulation: pharmaceutical applications” written by Peter Kleinebudde and published in European Journal of Pharmaceutics and Biopharmaceutics 58 (2004) at pages 317-326.
Direct compression is generally considered to be the simplest and the most economical process for producing tablets. However, it may only be applied to materials that do not need to be granulated before tableting. Direct compression requires only two principal steps; i.e., the mixing of all the ingredients and the compression of this mixture. However, direct compression is applicable to only a relatively small number of substances as the ingredients of the tablets often need to be processed by some granulation technique to make them compressible and/or for improving their homogeneity and flow-ability.
A component of a tablet is usually described as being either an excipient or an active ingredient. Active ingredients are normally those that trigger a pharmaceutical, chemical or nutritive effect and they are present in the tablet only in the amount necessary to provide the desired effect. Excipients are inert ingredients that are included to facilitate the preparation of the dosage forms or to adapt the release characteristics of the active ingredients, or for other purposes ancillary to those of the active ingredients.
Excipients can be characterized according to their function in the formulation as, for instance, lubricants, glidants, fillers (or diluents), disintegrants, binders, flavors, sweeteners and dyes.
Lubricants are intended to improve the ejection of the compressed tablet from the die of the tablet-making equipment and to prevent sticking in the punches.
Glidants are added to improve the powder flow. They are typically used to help the component mixture to fill the die evenly and uniformly prior to compression.
Fillers are inert ingredients sometimes used as bulking agents in order to decrease the concentration of the active ingredient in the final formulation. Binders in many cases also function as fillers.
Disintegrants may be added to formulations in order to help the tablets disintegrate when they are placed in a liquid environment and so release the active ingredient. The disintegration properties usually are based upon the ability of the disintegrant to swell in the presence of a liquid, such as water or gastric juice. This swelling disrupts the continuity of the tablet structure and thus allows the different components to enter into solution or into suspension
Binders are used to hold together the structure of the tablets. They have the ability to bind together the other ingredients after sufficient compression forces have been applied and they contribute to the integrity of the tablets.
Finding the proper excipients for particular APIs and determining the proper manufacturing process for the combination of excipients and APIs can be a time-consuming job that may lengthen the design process of a pharmaceutical product, such as a tablet significantly, even by years.
Both the dry and wet granulation methods of the prior art may produce solid bridges between particles within granules that may be undesirable for example in that they lead to unsatisfactory subsequent tablet characteristics. The solid bridges may be caused by partial melting, hardening binders or crystallization of dissolved substances. Partial melting may for example occur when high compaction force is used in dry granulation methods. When the pressure in the compaction process is released, crystallization of particles may take place and bind the particles together. Introduction of hardening binders is common in pharmaceutical wet granulations when a binder is included in the granulating solvent. The solvent forms liquid bridges, and the binder will harden or crystallize on drying to form solid bridges between the particles. Examples of binders which can function in this way are polyvinylpyrrolidone, cellulose derivatives (e.g. carboxymethylcellulose) and pregelatinized starch. Substances, e.g. lactose, which can dissolve during a wet granulation process may subsequently crystallize on drying acting as a hardening binder.
Electrostatic forces may also be important in causing powder cohesion and the initial formation of agglomerates, e.g. during mixing. In general they do not contribute significantly to the final strength of the granule. Van der Waals forces, however, may be about four orders of magnitude greater than electrostatic forces and can contribute significantly to the strength of granules, e.g. those produced by dry granulation. The magnitude of these forces increases as the distance between particle surfaces decreases.
In addition to finding a practical manufacturing process for a pharmaceutical product, validation of the manufacturing process is essential. Validation means that the process must be able to reliably produce a consistently acceptable and predictable outcome each time the process is used. Wet granulation methods are quite challenging to manage in this respect. The wet granulation process is often quite vulnerable to small changes in manufacturing conditions. For example, variations in the moisture content of starch in the manufacturing process after drying may produce a tablet that is too hygroscopic or which has a reduced shelf life. When a pharmaceutical product is being developed in laboratory conditions, the conditions can be controlled relatively easily. However, the conditions available in mass production environments are typically less accurately controllable thus making validation of the manufacturing process a difficult and time consuming task. The same can be said about direct compression methods where the quality of the final product depends on the physical properties of the API and excipients. A small change in such properties can result, for example, in segregation and flow-ability problems.
Because of the manufacturing and process validation issues related to wet granulation and direct compression methods, it is desirable, particularly in the pharmaceutical industry, to use dry granulation techniques whenever possible. However, the dry granulation methods known in the prior art produce granules that are seldom usable in a tablet manufacturing process. Conflicting process design parameters often lead to compromises where some qualities of the resulting granule product may be good, but other desirable qualities are lacking or absent. For example, the flow characteristics of the granules may be insufficient, the non-homogeneity of the granules may cause segregation in the manufacturing process or capping in tablets, or some of the granules may exhibit excessive hardness, all of which can make the tableting process very difficult, slow and sometimes impossible. Furthermore, the bulk granules may be difficult to compress into tablets. Alternatively or additionally, the disintegration characteristics of the resulting tablets may be sub-optimal. Such problems commonly relate to the non-homogeneity and granule structure of the granulate mass produced by the compactor. For instance, the mass may have too high a percentage of fine particles or some granules produced by the compactor may be too dense for effective tableting.
It is also well known in the art that in order to get uniform tablets the bulk to be tableted should be homogeneous and should have good flow characteristics.
In prior art dry granulation processes such as roll compaction, the resulting bulk is not generally homogeneously flowing, for example because of the presence of relatively large (1-3 mm) and dense granules together with very small (e.g. 1-30 μm) particles. This can cause segregation as the large, typically dense and/or hard granules of the prior art flow in a different way to the fine particles when the granulate mass is conveyed in the manufacturing process, e.g. during tableting. Because of the segregation, it is often difficult to ensure production of acceptable tablets. For this reason, in the art there are some known devices in which the small particles and sometimes also the biggest particles are separated from the rest of the granules with the help of a fractionating device such as (a set of) vibrating screen(s). This process is generally complicated and noisy and the result is a relatively homogeneously flowing bulk where the granules are hard and difficult to compress into tablets. Furthermore, the process of separating small particles from granules becomes very difficult if the material is sticky and the screen-size is not big enough. Generally in this process the apertures of the screen must have a minimum dimension of at least 500 μm.
Another problem which occurs in dry granulation methods of the prior art is the difficulty of preparing, in the development stage, a pilot bulk which is representative of the production bulk. Thus, the compaction forces and the other compaction parameters used at the laboratory scale can be very different from those used at the production scale. As a result the properties, e.g. flow-ability of the production bulk can be very different from that which has been prepared in a pilot facility. One sieving method applicable in laboratory scale is air sieving. One conventional air sieve involves passing a powder through a mesh of defined size in order to exclude particles below the specified size (the desired granules are retained above the mesh and the rejected particles pass below). Air is passed through the mesh to carry away the fine particles. The problem with the air sieves of the prior art is that their capacity is not sufficient for industrial production of granulate mass. Furthermore, the air sieves that rely on mesh size in the separation of rejected material often exclude desirable small granules from the acceptable granulate mass when separating out the fine particles from the mass. Yet further, fragile granules may break in the sieving process where undersize particles are sucked through the apertures of the sieve.
Patent application WO 99/11261 discloses dry-granulated granules that may comprise API only. In the method disclosed in the application, an air sieve known in the prior art is used for separating fine particles (particles and granules smaller than 150 or 125 μm) from granules comprising up to 100% of API. The sieving utilizes a sieve whose mesh size is about the maximum size of rejectable particles, e.g. 150 μm. It seems that the granules of the disclosure have been created using relatively high compaction forces since the proportion of fine particles (smaller than 125 μm) after compaction is at most around 26 percent (see table 1). The method results, following sieving, in a flowing homogeneous granulate mass that would be expected to comprise generally hard granules and that substantially is lacking granules and particles smaller than 150 or 125 μm.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,161,516 teaches a composition for treating airway disease using soft tablets or granules for inhalation administration. The method of the patent is suitable for producing granules that are soft enough to break apart in an airstream.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,752,939 teaches a method and an apparatus for predicting the suitability of a substance for dry granulation by roller compaction using small sample sizes.
U.K. Patent 1,558,153 discloses a method for producing organic dye material from finely divided particles by compressing said finely divided particles to produce a coherent mass of material, comminuting said coherent mass of material, and recovering granular material in the particle size range of 100-1000 microns from said comminuted material. The finest particles are removed by air flow.
We have now found an improved method and apparatus for dry granulation. The method may be applicable to a large variety of solid powder substances, e.g. APIs and excipients, as well as non-pharmaceutical products e.g. those used in the chemical and food industries.